August 1, 2011

Development updates on July 31

It has been a while since the last development updates. This absence of branch activities was mainly because of time constraints the main dev (T.K.) had during the last few months. Due to restricted time resources, commits to the branch were mostly limited to merges of changes from the trunk and bug fixes based on problem reports from branch users. The issues addressed include: (1) a wrong use of matrix inversion in the Distance from Object modifier; (2) composite node parameter animation not working with Freestyle; (3) a memory leak in silhouette edge detection; (4) linker errors for building blenderplayer; and (5) a bug in line caps due to zero-length strokes. The dev team appreciate the feedback from the branch users who kindly reported these issues, some with .blend files to help us reproduce the problems.

In addition, the Parameter Editor mode of the Freestyle graphical user interface was enhanced with new Material modifiers that allow you to change the line color, alpha transparency, and line thickness of strokes by object materials. The screenshot below shows the GUI controls of the Material color modifier.

The following set of rendering results demonstrates a typical use the Material color modifier: (a) the stroke color is constant (i.e., the base color is black); (b) the Material color modifier is applied and the base color is replaced by the the diffuse color of object materials (i.e., blend = Mix, influence = 1.0); (c) same as (b) but the diffuse color of object materials is blended into the base color (blend = Add and influence = 0.4).

Artwork with Freestyle for Blender

In the meantime, several branch users released excellent animation shorts and movie clips made partly with Freestyle. First, Chris Burton and his colleagues released a finished animation short “The Light at the End“. This is one of the most impressive pieces of artwork that give you a real sense of how line drawing with Freestyle looks like.

Dolf Veenvliet (macouno) has been using Freestyle for his Entoforms project. Entoforms are little creatures generated by a program that “grows” them through a kind of DNA strings. The use of Freestyle is meant to give a “drawn” look to 3D renders according to one of project blog posts.

And last but not least, Ike AhLoe released a finished animation short “Clocked In“. During the production of this artwork, he contributed to the Freestyle integration project through a number of bug reports and development updates.

We are very grateful for the authors of these art products, since the early adoption of the Freestyle renderer should have been tough and time-consuming due to bugs and limitations. We hope these frontier examples encourage further use of Freestyle in future 3D art projects.